[Dr. Renaud Piarroux, a French epidemiologist] was startled to find UN agencies like the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) — and the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — uninterested in finding the source of the outbreak.

(...) this was baffling. The American and UN authorities seemed to be committed to an “environmental” origin for cholera in the Caribbean Sea. (...) the UN and U.S. agencies even brought in a team of investigators who had built their careers on the theory of environmental cholera.

(...) just before leaving Haiti, Piarroux received a secret document: a report by the MSPP, made in the very early days of the outbreak. With remarkable speed, the ministry had sent a team to the Artibonite River and identified the source as the Nepali camp. They’d been denied entry to the camp, but local residents provided plenty of details.

So within days of the outbreak the Haitians had known its source — and so had CDC and PAHO. Why hadn’t they said so, and why had Préval dismissed the idea of finding it?

(...) Haiti was (and is) ruled by a coalition of UN and U.S. agencies plus a chaotic mass of non-governmental organizations. The government in Port-au-Prince was (and is) far from sovereign. Préval had understood his situation, and had sent Piarroux the ministry report anonymously, to help him tell the world what he himself could not.

(...) alarmingly for any serious public health expert, a lot of public health experts went along with the scam. While thousands of Haitians were dying in puddles of their own vomit and diarrhea, the experts did their considerable best to lie to the world about why those people were dying.